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Why Enterprise Service Management Implementations Fail, and Why It’s Almost Never the Software

Why Enterprise Service Management Implementations Fail, and Why It’s Almost Never the Software

5-minute Read

You bought a capable platform. Your team still isn’t using it. The data’s inconsistent, the forecast is guesswork, and nothing much has got faster.

It’s a common place to end up. Across more than two decades of finance, HR and operations implementations, we’ve found the same things decide the outcome regardless of what’s being installed. The software is rarely the problem. What happened before it arrived usually is.

The four things that decide it

Nobody agreed what good looked like

Leadership teams often agree the current situation is unsatisfactory without agreeing what an improved one would look like in numbers. If you can't say what success is, you can't tell anyone later whether you reached it.

The data was already a mess, and it stayed one

Duplicates and half-empty fields don't fix themselves in migration. They move across, people stop trusting the reporting within weeks, and adoption is very hard to win back after that.

The workflows were designed by people who'd never done the job

Standard process models are fine as a starting point, but they're no substitute for understanding how your best people actually work. Design without them and you get processes people quietly work around.

Adoption was a date, not a transition

Training the week before go-live isn't change management. It's an announcement. Behaviour shifts over months, and somebody has to be managing it throughout.

What we do differently

We work backwards from the outcome, not forwards from the feature list. That means agreeing three to five measurable outcomes before anyone looks at a platform, auditing and cleaning the data before migration, designing workflows around how your best people actually work, and staying past go-live to manage adoption properly.

Unglamorous, mostly. It’s also the part that decides whether anyone trusts the system six months in.

Does the platform matter?

Less than you’d think. Chazey is vendor agnostic, recommending an appropriate solution for our clients based on balance of usability, implementation cost, maintenance effort, and their existing technology platforms. We have supported several Enterprise Service Management implementations with ServiceNow and Oracle, and we recently became partners with Freshworks.

The wider point holds either way. We’ve watched organisations struggle on enterprise-grade systems and do very well on modest ones. The difference was never the product.

Three measures worth watching

It takes effort to integrate enterprise service management solutions effectively into your workflow. This effort should be expected, built into your operating model, and monitored for any bottlenecks.
That effort pays off with the improvement in quality, consistency, and transparency. Each of these should be measured to ensure that integrations, adoption, and practice are aligned to expectations.
Cycle time.Time to close, time to resolve. These are the numbers that turn into money, and the ones your finance function will accept as proof of return.

Ultimately, it comes down to the accuracy of your use case. The gap between what you predicted and what happened. An enterprise service management platform that’s working should show visible improvement here within 90 days. If it doesn’t, look at your data, processes, and culture – before you blame the tool.

Four questions before you shortlist anything

Can you write down, in numbers, what this system needs to change? If three people on your leadership team would answer differently, you’re not ready to select.
Do you know how bad your data is? Not roughly. Has anyone counted the duplicates and the incomplete records?
Who are your three best performers, and has anyone asked them how they actually work?
Who owns adoption after go-live, and for how long? If the answer is nobody, that’s your biggest risk.

Answer all four confidently and you’re in better shape than most organisations we meet. Go ahead and select an Enterprise Service Management solution. If one or two of these questions cause you to pause, that’s the work to do first, and it’s a great deal cheaper now than in month eight.

If you’d like to talk it through, get in touch. Tell us where you are and what you’re trying to fix, and we’ll be straight with you about whether we’re the right people to help.